“AXIOMATIC” — something that is self-evident, so obvious that few would question it — is a curious descriptor because, quite often, it takes a scholar to characterize what only later seems obvious to the rest of us. Humans since time immemorial had experienced gravity, for example, but it took an intellect like Isaac Newton to frame it as a scientific theory — and change the world. The interconnectedness of nature also seems axiomatic today, but it was a bold new concept when German geographer Alexander von Humboldt first articulated it, as Andrea Wulf argued in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature.
Likewise, how cities work economically, and what imparts value to certain areas and not others, might seem elementary to modern urbanists and preservationists. But it took scholars to generalize patterns, and one of them was Richard M. Hurd.
Richard Melancthon Hurd was born in New York City in 1865 and studied economics and architecture at Yale in the 1880s, during which time he also pursued a penchant for travel and exploration. He became a noted alpinist, scaling the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps and demonstrating keen interests in geography and landscapes. By the time he settled into a professional career in the 1890s, his various pursuits merged to make him something of an economic geographer, working as director of the Mortgage Department for the U.S. Mortgage & Trust Company.
By his own account, Hurd “searched in vain, both in England and this country, for books on the science of city real estate as an aid in judging values. Finding in economic books merely brief references to city land and elsewhere only fragmentary articles, [his] plan arose to outline the theory of the structure of cities and to state the average scales of land values produced by different utilities within them.”
From 1895 to the early 1900s, Hurd visited 50 American cities, including New Orleans, where he gathered information, collected maps and interviewed locals. He synthesized his findings to discern “the structures of cities — including their locations, starting points, and lines of growth” toward understanding variations in the “valuations of land and buildings.” His book, Principles of City Land Values, was published in 1903.
Hurd’s Principles is part Urban Geography 101 and part Real Estate 101, at a time when neither field had much of a canon, if they were considered fields at all. It’s also unapologetically capitalistic: Hurd wrote from the perspective of a loan officer for a large real estate corporation based in New York City in the Gilded Age. While that left little room for the notion of “value” to take other forms (such as historical, architectural or cultural), it did enable Hurd to distill the factors that imbue market-driven fiscal worth into urban space — factors that may seem, well, axiomatic to us today, but were compelling new principles when put in print in 1903.
For example, consider the real estate adage “location, location, location,” as the main driver of real estate value. Hurd: “Land go[es] to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder being the one who can make the land earn the largest amount. We may note that the better the location, the more uses to which it can be put, hence the more bidders for it.”
Consider the basic concept of zoning the uses of land to minimize conflict and enhance value. Hurd: “Analyzing city land according to its utilization, it may be divided into three main classes, that used for business, that for residences and that for public buildings…. The first step [in] the physical evolution of a large city from a small one… is the separation between business and dwellings.” Within two decades of Hurd’s writings, cities from coast to coast set up planning commissions and passed zoning ordinances.
As to the oft-observed benefits of businesses forming districts, Hurt documented that “retail stores either cluster at the business center or follow out traffic streets… facilitate[ing] his possible customers by placing his shop where the largest number of them would pass even though his shop were not there.”
Recognizing the role of foot traffic and commercial agglomeration in invigorating business activity, he berated architects for designing corners and ground floors in a manner that occluded convenient access by shoppers to shops. Just as important were the designs of display spaces. When operating a well-positioned enterprise in a well-designed space, he wrote, the shopkeeper “utilizes his shop windows and signs to draw customers into his shop, the two elements of convenience of location and advertising advantage work hand in hand.” Think of Royal Street or Magazine Street, where propinquity and exhibition interact to create urban spaces that are both commercially rigorous and visually interesting.
Hurst noted that the drivers of value differed for residential neighborhoods, “among these being nearness to parks, a good approach from the business centre, not too near nor yet too far, [and] favorable transportation facilities.” Every reader of Preservation in Print knows that green space, walkability, local merchants, and efficient public transit make for good neighborhoods, and many might invoke Jane Jacobs’ writings from the 1960s as their source. Hurd saw them as early as the 1890s.
Hurd’s perspective as mortgage executive steered him to view market forces as the be-all-and-end-all of land use and value. He cited “a moderate [topographic] elevation” and an “absence of nuisances” to his list of desirable assets for residential neighborhoods. (“New Orleans owes its location,” he wrote, “to the fact that the land on which it was built was a few feet higher than any river land within many miles of it.”) His insinuation was that we should expect — and accept — that the other half of society will end up in hazardous spaces, since elevation (and runoff) has to go downward somewhere, and nuisances such sewerage and garbage cannot disappear altogether.
On the question of social equity — what today we might refer to as environmental justice or the “right to the city” — Hurd comes across as cavalierly utilitarian: “The land goes to the highest bidder,” he asserted, “the rich selecting the locations which please them, those of moderate means living as nearby as possible, and so on down the scale of wealth, the poorest workmen taking the final leavings, either adjacent to such nuisances as factories, railroads, docks, etc., or far out of the city.”
Hurd likely would be criticized today for not problematizing the relegation of the poor to inferior living spaces. But he cannot be faulted for plainly documenting, using empirical data — what happens to whom, where, and why — in the 50 cities he analyzed.
New Orleans was among Hurd’s study areas, and one gets the sense he found here rich gist for his pattern-discernments. In regard to the observation that large cities are actually composites of small towns — a “city of neighborhoods,” each interacting intramurally more so than extramurally — Hurt wrote, “In New York many thousands of the upper classes have never been west of Sixth Avenue or east of Third Avenue, except to the ferries, and many thousands on the lower east side have never seen Fifth Avenue, while in New Orleans many Creoles have never crossed Canal Street into the American quarter.”
In noting the magnetic effects of tony districts, he cited the American Quarter and St. Charles Avenue/Garden District as the premier determinants of New Orleans’s upriver growth trajectory. “The reason the best residence district rather than the largest residence district draws the city is doubtless that the far higher percentage of purchasing power of the wealthy more than offsets the superior numbers of the poorer classes.” Indeed, New Orleans expanded more in an upriver direction than downriver (by a three-to-one ratio, in fact, measured by geographical distance) over the course of the 19th century, despite that more people resided in the downtown wards.
Hurd also had a knack for dropping provocative generalities, including ones that would be considered anything but axiomatic today. In further explaining the drivers of commercial-versus-residential geographies, he wrote that “business property is selected by the man from an economic standpoint, and residence property by the woman from a social standpoint.”
What can preservationists learn from Hurd’s Principles of City Land Values, nearly 120 years after its publication? For one, it’s replete with highly edifying expository writing that helps demystify complex questions. An example entails his diagnosis of why cities arise in certain locations and not in others. With his characteristic pithiness, Hurd contended that commercial cities originate at “the most convenient point of contact with the outer world; this being a wharf where deep water and a high bank meet, if transportation is by water.” Even though he was speaking globally, Hurd captured in one sentence the essential siting rationale behind most port cities, including New Orleans.
We also get a sense of what’s missing from Hurd’s conceptualization of value as being solely fiscal in nature, a notion that would have justified the wholesale demolition of, say, the French Quarter. One wonders how Hurd, who died in 1941, might react today upon learning that a neighborhood that was low in fiscal value in 1903 had been reconceptualized as high in historical, architectural and cultural value, thanks to early preservationists. Today the French Quarter is high in historical, architectural, cultural, and fiscal value, leaving us with a sense that Hurd could learn as much from us as we can from him.
Finally, preservationists can glean from Hurd an early academic articulation of what constitutes good urbanism — the density, proximity, walkability, diversity, green space, wise stewardship of land uses, organic formation of residential neighborhoods and commercial districts, and how good architecture can abet all of the above.
That is to say, we can learn the origin of our own axioms.
RICHARD CAMPANELLA is a geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture and author of Draining New Orleans; The West Bank of Greater New Orleans; and Bourbon Street: A History (LSU Press), and The Cottage on Tchoupitoulas from the Preservation Resource Center. Campanella may be reached through richcampanella.com, rcampane@tulane.edu, or @nolacampanella on X.
